(→‎For UEFI motherboards: I'm replacing the instructions for modprobing efivars for now on the basis of https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1328120 since only that method seems to be working with the Sept. iso (at least for some users))

Installation

You are now presented with a shell prompt, automatically logged in as root.

Change the language

Tip: These are optional for the majority of users. Useful only if you plan on writing in your own language in any of the configuration files, if you use diacritical marks in the Wi-Fi password, or if you would like to receive system messages (e.g. possible errors) in your own language.
Changes here only affect the installation process.

By default, the keyboard layout is set to us. If you have a non-US keyboard layout, run:

# loadkeys layout

...where layout can be fr, uk, dvorak, be-latin1, etc. See here for 2-letter country code list.

The font should also be changed, because most languages use more glyphs than the 26 letter English alphabet. Otherwise some foreign characters may show up as white squares or as other symbols. Note that the name is case-sensitive, so please type it exactly as you see it:

# setfont Lat2-Terminus16

By default, the language is set to English (US). If you would like to change the language for the install process (German, in this example), remove the # in front of the locale you want from /etc/locale.gen, along with English (US). Please choose the UTF-8 entry.

To edit using the simple Nano editor, type nano /etc/locale.gen and make your changes. Use Ctrl+X to exit, and when prompted to save changes, press Y and Enter to use the same filename.

# nano /etc/locale.gen

en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
de_DE.UTF-8 UTF-8

# locale-gen
# export LANG=de_DE.UTF-8

Remember, LAlt+LShift activates and deactivates the keymap.

Establish an internet connection

Warning: As of v197, udev no longer assigns network interface names according to the wlanX and ethX naming scheme. If you are coming from a different distribution or are reinstalling Arch and not aware of the new interface naming style, please do not assume that your wireless interface is named wlan0, or that your wired interface is named eth0. You can use the command ip link to discover the names of your interfaces.

The dhcpcd network daemon starts automatically during boot and it will attempt to start a wired connection. Try to ping a server to see if a connection was established. For example, Google's webservers:

If you get a ping: unknown host error, first check if there is an issue with your cable or wireless signal strength. If not, you will need to set up the network manually, as explained below. Once a connection is established move on to Prepare the storage drive.

Wired

Follow this procedure if you need to set up a wired connection via a static IP address.

First, disable the dhcpcd service which was started automatically at boot:

In this example, the Ethernet interface is enp2s0f0. If you are unsure, your Ethernet interface is likely to start with the letter "e", and unlikely to be "lo" or start with the letter "w". You can also use iwconfig and see which interfaces are not wireless:

In this example, wlp3s0 is the available wireless interface. If you are unsure, your wireless interface is likely to start with the letter "w", and unlikely to be "lo" or start with the letter "e".

Note: If you do not see output similar to this, then your wireless driver has not been loaded. If this is the case, you must load the driver yourself. Please see Wireless Setup for more detailed information.

Bring the interface up with:

# ip link set wlp3s0 up

Most wireless chipsets require firmware in addition to a corresponding driver. The kernel tries to identify and load both automatically. If you get output like SIOCSIFFLAGS: No such file or directory, this means you will need to manually load the firmware. If unsure, invoke dmesg to query the kernel log for a firmware request from the wireless chipset. For example, if you have an Intel chipset which requires and has requested firmware from the kernel at boot:

# dmesg | grep firmware

firmware: requesting iwlwifi-5000-1.ucode

If there is no output, it may be concluded that the system's wireless chipset does not require firmware.

Warning: Wireless chipset firmware packages (for cards which require them) are pre-installed under /usr/lib/firmware in the live environment (on CD/USB stick) but must be explicitly installed to your actual system to provide wireless functionality after you reboot into it! Package installation is covered later in this guide. Ensure installation of both your wireless module and firmware before rebooting! See Wireless Setup if you are unsure about the requirement of corresponding firmware installation for your particular chipset.

Tip: When using Gparted, selecting the option to create a new partition table gives an "msdos" partition table by default. If you are intending to follow the advice to create a GPT partition table then you need to choose "Advanced" and then select "gpt" from the drop-down menu.

While gparted may be easier to use, if you just want to create a few partitions on a new disk you can get the job done quickly by just using one of the fdisk variants which are included on the install medium. There are short usage instructions for both gdisk and fdisk.

Partition scheme

You can decide into how many partitions the disk should be split, and for which directory each partition should be used in the system. The mapping from partitions to directories (frequently called 'mount points') is the Partition scheme. The simplest, and not a bad choice, is to make just one huge / partition. Another popular choice is to have a / and a /home partition.

If you have a BIOS motherboard (or plan on booting in BIOS compatibility mode) and you want to setup GRUB on a GPT-partitioned drive, you will need to create an extra BIOS Boot Partition of size 1 or 2 MiB and EF02 type code. Syslinux does not need one.

If you have a requirement for a Disk_encryption of the system itself, this must be reflected in your partition scheme. It is unproblematic to add encrypted folders, containers or home directories after the system is installed.

If you are planning to use any filesystem for root filesystem different than ext4 (such as F2fs), you should check first if GRUB supports it. If it is not supported you need to create a GRUB compatible partition (such as ext4) and use it for /boot.

See Swap for details if you wish to set up a swap partition or swap file. A swap file is easier to resize than a partition and can be created at any point after installation, but cannot be used with a Btrfs filesystem.

Considerations for dualbooting with windows

If you have an existing OS installation, please keep in mind that if you were to just write a completely new partition table to disk then all the data which was previously on disk would be lost.

The recommended way to setup a linux/windows dual booting system is to first install windows, only using part of the disk for its partitions. When you have finished the windows setup, boot into the linux install environment where you can create additional partitions for linux while leaving the existing windows partitions untouched.

Some newer computers come pre-installed with Windows 8 which will be using Secure Boot. Arch Linux currently does not support Secure Boot, but some Windows 8 installations have been seen not to boot if Secure Boot is turned off in the BIOS. In some cases it is necessary to turn off both Secure Boot as well as Fastboot in the BIOS options in order to allow Windows 8 to boot without Secure Boot. However there are potential security risks in turning off Secure Boot for booting up Windows 8. Therefore, it may be a better option to keep the Windows 8 install intact and have an independent hard drive for the Linux install - which can then be partitioned from scratch using a GPT partition table. Once that is done, creating several ext4/FAT32/swap partitions on the second drive may be a better way forward if the computer has two drives available. This is often not easy or possible on a small laptop. Currently, Secure Boot is still not in a fully stable state for reliable operation, even for Linux distributions that support it.

Using cgdisk to create GPT partitions

Press the down arrow a couple of times to move to the larger free space area.

Choose New (or press N) – Enter for the first sector – Enter to use the rest of the drive (or you could type in the desired size; for example 30G) – Enter for the default hex code (8300) – Enter for a blank partition name.

In case this doesn't work because fdisk encountered an error, you can use the q command to exit.

Create filesystems

Simply partitioning is not enough; the partitions also need a filesystem. To format the partitions with an ext4 filesystem:

Warning: Double check and triple check that it is actually /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 that you want to format. You can use lsblk to help with this.

# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2

If you have made a partition dedicated to swap (code 82), do not forget to format and activate it with:

# mkswap /dev/sdaX
# swapon /dev/sdaX

For UEFI, you should format the ESP partition (for example /dev/sdXY) with:

# mkfs.vfat -F32 /dev/sdXY

Mount the partitions

Each partition is identified with a number suffix. For example, sda1 specifies the first partition of the first drive, while sda designates the entire drive.

To display the current partition layout:

# lsblk /dev/sda

Note: Do not mount more than one partition to the same directory. And pay attention, because the mounting order is important.

First, mount the root partition on /mnt. Following the example above (yours may be different), it would be:

# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

Then mount the home partition and any other separate partition (/boot, /var, etc), if you have any:

# mkdir /mnt/home
# mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/home

In case you have a UEFI motherboard, mount the EFI System Partition at your preferred mountpoint (/boot used for example):

# mkdir -p /mnt/boot
# mount /dev/sdXY /mnt/boot

Select a mirror

Before installing, you may want to edit the mirrorlist file and place your preferred mirror first. A copy of this file will be installed on your new system by pacstrap as well, so it is worth getting it right.

Ctrl+X to exit, and when prompted to save changes, press Y and Enter to use the same filename.

If you want, you can make it the only mirror available by getting rid of everything else (using Ctrl+K), but it is usually a good idea to have a few more, in case the first one goes offline.

Tip:

Use the Mirrorlist Generator to get an updated list for your country. HTTP mirrors are faster than FTP, because of something called keepalive. With FTP, pacman has to send out a signal each time it downloads a package, resulting in a brief pause. For other ways to generate a mirror list, see Sorting mirrors and Reflector.

Arch Linux MirrorStatus reports various aspects about the mirrors such as network problems with mirrors, data collection problems, the last time mirrors have been synced, etc.

Note:

Whenever in the future you change your list of mirrors, always remember to force pacman to refresh all package lists with pacman -Syy. This is considered to be good practice and will avoid possible headaches. See Mirrors for more information.

If you are using an older installation medium, your mirrorlist might be outdated, which might lead to problems when updating Arch Linux (see FS#22510). Therefore it is advised to obtain the latest mirror information as described above.

Some issues have been reported in the Arch Linux forums regarding network problems that prevent pacman from updating/synchronizing repositories (see [1] and [2]). When installing Arch Linux natively, these issues have been resolved by replacing the default pacman file downloader with an alternative (see Improve Pacman Performance for more details). When installing Arch Linux as a guest OS in VirtualBox, this issue has also been addressed by using "Host interface" instead of "NAT" in the machine properties.

Install the base system

The -i switch can be omitted if you wish to install every package from the base group without prompting.

# pacstrap -i /mnt base

Note:

If pacman fails to verify your packages, check the system time with cal. If the system date is invalid (e.g. it shows the year 2010), signing keys will be considered expired (or invalid), signature checks on packages will fail and installation will be interrupted. Make sure to correct the system time, either by doing so manually or with the ntp client, and retry running the pacstrap command. Refer to Time page for more information on correcting system time.

If pacman complains that error: failed to commit transaction (invalid or corrupted package), run the following command:

# pacman-key --init && pacman-key --populate archlinux

This will give you a basic Arch system. Other packages can be installed later using pacman.

Generate an fstab

Generate an fstab file with the following command. UUIDs will be used because they have certain advantages (see fstab#Identifying filesystems). If you would prefer to use labels instead, replace the -U option with -L.

# genfstab -U -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
# nano /mnt/etc/fstab

Warning: The fstab file should always be checked after generating it. If you encounter errors running genfstab or later in the install process, do not run genfstab again; just edit the fstab file.

A few considerations:

The last field determines the order in which partitions are checked at start up: use 1 for the (non-btrfs) root partition, which should be checked first; 2 for all other partitions you want checked at start up; and 0 means 'do not check' (see fstab#Field definitions).

All btrfs partitions should have 0 for this field. Normally, you will also want your swap partition to have 0.

Chroot and configure the base system

Note: If you are planning to reboot Arch in UEFI mode, read For UEFI motherboards as there are some things to take care of before entering the chroot. This is necessary to ensure the boot loader or manager can be correctly configured within the chroot.

At this stage of the installation, you will configure the primary configuration files of your Arch Linux base system. These can either be created if they do not exist, or edited if you wish to change the defaults.

Closely following and understanding these steps is of key importance to ensure a properly configured system.

Locale

Locales are used by glibc and other locale-aware programs or libraries for rendering text, correctly displaying regional monetary values, time and date formats, alphabetic idiosyncrasies, and other locale-specific standards.

There are two files that need editing: locale.gen and locale.conf.

The locale.gen file is empty by default (everything is commented out) and you need to remove the # in front of the line(s) you want. You may uncomment more lines than just English (US), as long as you choose their UTF-8 encoding:

# nano /etc/locale.gen

en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
de_DE.UTF-8 UTF-8

# locale-gen

This will run on every glibc upgrade, generating all the locales specified in /etc/locale.gen.

The locale.conf file does not exist by default. Setting only LANG should be enough. It will act as the default value for all other variables.

# echo LANG=en_US.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf
# export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Note: If you set some other language than English (US) at the beginning of the install, the above commands would be something like:

# echo LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf
# export LANG=de_DE.UTF-8

To use other locales for other LC_* variables, run locale to see the available options and add them to locale.conf. It is not recommended to set the LC_ALL variable. An advanced example can be found here.

Console font and keymap

If you set a keymap at the beginning of the install process, load it now, as well, because the environment has changed. For example:

# loadkeys de-latin1
# setfont Lat2-Terminus16

To make them available after reboot, edit vconsole.conf:

# nano /etc/vconsole.conf

KEYMAP=de-latin1
FONT=Lat2-Terminus16

KEYMAP – Please note that this setting is only valid for your TTYs, not any graphical window managers or Xorg.

FONT – Available alternate console fonts reside in /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/. The default (blank) is safe, but some foreign characters may show up as white squares or as other symbols. It is recommended that you change it to Lat2-Terminus16, because according to /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/README.Lat2-Terminus16, it claims to support "about 110 language sets".

Possible option FONT_MAP – Defines the console map to load at boot. Read man setfont. Removing it or leaving it blank is safe.

Warning: Using localtime may lead to several known and unfixable bugs. However, there are no plans to drop support for localtime.

# hwclock --systohc --localtime

If you have (or planning on having) a dual boot setup with Windows:

Recommended: Set both Arch Linux and Windows to use UTC. A quick registry fix is needed. Also, be sure to prevent Windows from synchronizing the time on-line, because the hardware clock will default back to localtime.

Not recommended: Set Arch Linux to localtime and disable any time-related services, like NTPd . This will let Windows take care of hardware clock corrections and you will need to remember to boot into Windows at least two times a year (in Spring and Autumn) when DST kicks in. So please do not ask on the forums why the clock is one hour behind or ahead if you usually go for days or weeks without booting into Windows.

Kernel modules

Tip: This is just an example, you do not need to set it. All needed modules are automatically loaded by udev, so you will rarely need to add something here. Only add modules that you know are missing.

For kernel modules to load during boot, place a *.conf file in /etc/modules-load.d/, with a name based on the program that uses them.

# nano /etc/modules-load.d/virtio-net.conf

# Load 'virtio-net.ko' at boot.
virtio-net

If there are more modules to load per *.conf, the module names can be separated by newlines. A good example are the VirtualBox Guest Additions.

Empty lines and lines starting with # or ; are ignored.

Hostname

Configure the network

You need to configure the network again, but this time for your newly installed environment. The procedure and prerequisites are very similar to the one described above, except we are going to make it persistent and automatically run at boot.

If you would like to use the old interface naming scheme (ie. eth* and wlan*) you can accomplish this by creating an empty file at /etc/udev/rules.d/80-net-name-slot.rules which will mask the file of the same name located under /usr/lib/udev/rules.d (alternatively, instead of an empty file, using a symlink to /dev/null is also an acceptable masking method).

Wired

Dynamic IP

Using dhcpcd

If you only use a single fixed wired network connection, you do not need a network management service and can simply enable the dhcpcd service:

Notice the /24 in Address which is the CIDR notation of a 255.255.255.0 netmask

Enable above created profile to start it at every boot:

# netctl enable my-network

Wireless

Note: If your wireless adapter requires a firmware (as described in the above Establish an internet connection section and also here), install the package containing your firmware. Most of the time, the linux-firmware package will contain the needed firmware. Though for some devices, the required firmware might be in its own package. For example:

Adding wireless networks

After finishing the rest of this installation and rebooting, you can connect to the network with wifi-menu interface_name (where interface_name is the interface of your wireless chipset).

# wifi-menu interface_name

Warning: This must be done *after* your reboot when you are no longer chrooted. The process spawned by this command will conflict with the one you have running outside of the chroot. Alternatively, you could just configure a network profile manually using the following templates so that you do not have to worry about using wifi-menu at all.

Using manual netctl profiles

Copy a network profile from /etc/netctl/examples to /etc/netctl:

# cd /etc/netctl
# cp examples/wireless-wpa my-network

Edit the profile as needed (modify Interface, ESSID and Key):

# nano my-network

Enable above created profile to start it at every boot:

# netctl enable my-network

Connect automatically to known networks

Warning: You cannot use this method in conjunction with explicitly enabling profiles, such as netctl enable <profile>.

Analog modem, ISDN or PPPoE DSL

Create an initial ramdisk environment

Tip: Most users can skip this step and use the defaults provided in mkinitcpio.conf. The initramfs image (from the /boot folder) has already been generated based on this file when the linux package (the Linux kernel) was installed earlier with pacstrap.

Here you need to set the right hooks if the root is on a USB drive, if you use RAID, LVM, or if /usr is on a separate partition.

Edit /etc/mkinitcpio.conf as needed and re-generate the initramfs image with:

# mkinitcpio -p linux

Note: Arch VPS installations on QEMU (e.g. when using virt-manager) may need virtio modules in mkinitcpio.conf to be able to boot.

# nano /etc/mkinitcpio.conf

MODULES="virtio virtio_blk virtio_pci virtio_net"

Set the root password

Set the root password with:

# passwd

Install and configure a bootloader

For BIOS motherboards

For BIOS systems, two bootloaders are available: Syslinux and GRUB. Choose the bootloader as per your convenience.

Syslinux is (currently) limited to loading only files from the partition where it was installed. Its configuration file is considered to be easier to understand. An example configuration can be found here.

GRUB is more feature-rich and supports more complex scenarios. Its configuration file(s) is more similar to 'sh' scripting language, which may be difficult for beginners to manually write. It is recommended that they automatically generate one.

Syslinux

Note: If you opted for a GUID partition table (GPT) for your hard drive earlier, you need to install the gptfdisk package now for this next step to work, assuming you have not installed it already.

Install the syslinux package and then use the syslinux-install_update script to automatically install the bootloader (-i), mark the partition active by setting the boot flag (-a), and install the MBR boot code (-m):

# pacman -S syslinux
# syslinux-install_update -i -a -m

Configure syslinux.cfg to point to the right root partition. This step is vital. If it points to the wrong partition, Arch Linux will not boot. Change /dev/sda3 to reflect your root partition (if you partitioned your drive as in the example, your root partition is sda1). Do the same for the fallback entry.

For UEFI motherboards

For UEFI systems, several options are available. A complete list of options is available at UEFI Bootloaders. You may find that some options work while others do not. Otherwise, choose one as per your convenience. Here, we give two of the possibilities as examples:

gummiboot is a simple boot manager, useful if you are dual booting. rEFInd is another alternative.

GRUB is a more complete bootloader, useful if you run into problems with the other two options.

Note: For UEFI boot, the drive needs to be GPT-partitioned and an EFI System Partition (512 MiB or larger, type EF00, formatted with FAT32) must be present. For the following examples, this partition is assumed to be mounted at /boot. If you have followed this guide from the beginning, you have already done all of these.

EFISTUB

Note: The below commands should be run BEFORE chroot, if any.

umount /sys/firmware/efi/efivars

modprobe -r efivars

modprobe efivars

Note: The below commands should be run AFTER chroot, if any.

Install the efibootmgr package and then create an Arch Linux boot entry:

Gummiboot

Install the gummiboot package and then run the following to install gummiboot as your bootloader:

# gummiboot install

You will need to manually create a configuration file to add an entry for Arch Linux to the gummiboot manager. Create /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf and add the following contents, replacing /dev/sdaX with your root partition, usually /dev/sda2: